For most of the twentieth century the Anacostia was Washington's working river, and nobody with a choice spent their leisure time on it. The Navy Yard was on it. Gas works, coal wharves, brewery traffic, landfills, and the outfalls of a growing city were on it. By the 1970s it was one of the most polluted rivers in the country.
So the people who used it were the people who lived along it — and the people the rest of the city's recreation had no room for.
That is the whole story of recreation on the Anacostia in one sentence. The sailing and yacht clubs of the era were closed to anyone who worked with their hands, so Washington's tradesmen built motorboat clubs instead, on a dirty river nobody was competing for: Navy Yard machinists, brewery workers, clerks, a carpenter, a boat livery operator. They built their own boats and their own clubhouses and put in their own marine railways, because no one was going to build any of it for them.
And they swam in it. The Tidal Basin had a proper bathing beach with a high dive from 1918, and it was for white Washingtonians only; Congress would rather close it in 1925 than integrate it. But the Anacostia's swimming holes had no gate, no ticket booth, and no attendant to enforce anything — just riverbank, and names everybody knew: Rutman's beach, the Coal Chute, Ant beach, Glass beach, the Gas House Wharves. The city's built facilities were segregated by rule. The water was not.
Then the government dredged a park into being on top of the mud, and the river's own history got complicated.
The River Was Made, Not Found
The Anacostia you see today is largely an engineered landscape. By the end of the nineteenth century the river's lower reach was a wide, shoaling expanse of tidal flats — a navigation problem and a public-health one, thick with sewage. In 1898 Congress passed an act mandating the dredging of the Anacostia.
The McMillan Plan of 1902 turned that engineering problem into a civic idea: dredge the channel, pump the spoil onto the flats, and build an "Anacostia Water Park" on the ground you just created. The firm of Sanford and Brooks began dredging in January 1903. The Army Corps of Engineers surveyed the surrounding land as the work went on, finishing in November 1905, and the federal government asserted ownership of the flats. In 1919 most of that reclaimed mud was declared parkland.
It worked, in the sense that it produced roughly 1,200 acres of riverfront park. It also buried the tidal marshes that had made the river live, and cut the remaining wetlands off from the tides — an ecological bill the region is still paying down.
Eastern Power Boat Club, 1905
The first club on the river started, as these things do, with fishing. A group of anglers near the Navy Yard "banded together, and turned to power boating." Eastern Power Boat Club dates its founding to 1905 — credited to William A. Mills, L. J. Johnston, and Monty Williams — formally organized on October 3, 1910 with twenty members, and incorporated on June 6, 1911.
These were not yachtsmen in blazers. Early members were Navy Yard and brewery workers, tradesmen, and servicemen, paying dues of fifty cents a month. They built their own boats. They laid their own marine railway — a cradle and track running down into the river — and the turn-of-the-century winch from that work still runs.
The leases tell you the scale of the thing. In June 1911, Mills won a wharf lease with a bid of $1.75 per foot. In 1912 the club leased ninety-three feet of city waterfront for $162.75 a year. From 1916 into the 1930s the club financed its own construction by issuing "Certificates of Indebtedness" to its members, repaid at six percent — a boat club acting as its own bank because no one else was going to lend to it.
Then the waterfront changed around them, twice. The club sat at the foot of 11th Street SE until 1919, when the Navy Yard's wartime expansion took in its site. Members had finished a two-story frame boathouse, thirty by forty feet with a loft, in 1913 — so rather than leave it behind they floated it across the river on a scow and set it down on the east bank just east of the 11th Street Bridge. In 1924 the park caught up with them: as Anacostia Park took shape on the reclaimed land, the new roads and water service reorganized the shoreline, and the club moved once more. They floated the same building again, to the Water Street site it has held ever since. It is the oldest purpose-built clubhouse still standing on Boathouse Row — a building that has been in three places and never been rebuilt.
The 1913 clubhouse today, at the Water Street site it reached in 1924. Courtesy Eastern Power Boat Club.
The Washington Yacht Club Came Out of Twining
The Washington Yacht Club was founded on April 27, 1910 — by two men from Twining, the neighborhood at the east end of the Pennsylvania Avenue bridge that maps still labeled by that name. Samuel Masson was its first commodore.
Its members were working-class residents of the east side of the river who wanted somewhere close and affordable to keep a motorboat, and the roster reads like the neighborhood: mechanics, clerks, a carpenter, a boat livery operator. They built their own boats and their own buildings and rarely contracted out the work — a habit the club preserved as mandatory work parties that continue today.
Its addresses trace the same story as Eastern's. From 1910 to 1915 the club sat at the bottom of Naylor Road SE, leasing docks from the city — the old ferry ground below the heights, where boats had been crossing since long before there was a bridge. Around 1915, as the reclamation of the Anacostia flats reshaped that bank, they moved a short way to the Pennsylvania Avenue bridge pier and built a clubhouse, twenty by thirty feet. In early 1925 they towed that clubhouse across the river on a scow to 1500 M Street SE. The original frame is still the middle of the building; a steward's room went on the back in 1929 and restrooms and a galley in 1930.
So for the club's first fifteen years, a Twining family could walk down the hill to their boat. The dockage ran between the old Naylor ferry landing and the Pennsylvania Avenue bridge — the two crossings that had defined that side of the river for a century.
The club took the river seriously as more than a parking spot: records show members reporting polluters and helping with cleanups as early as 1923. They ran marine security patrols during the Second World War and worked the Presidents Cup races from 1926. The clubhouse was listed on the National Register on October 2, 2020.
Seafarers, 1945
Lewis T. Green was an art teacher in DC Public Schools who built boats in his spare time. When he went looking for dockage on the Anacostia in the 1940s, the river's clubs were segregated, as almost everything in Washington was, and there was no place for him at them.
So he applied for river land of his own. His application sat until Mary McLeod Bethune took it up, and with her help he secured a lease from the Department of the Interior. In 1945 he founded the Seafarers Yacht Club in Anacostia Park. It is the oldest African American boating club in the United States, and it is still running.
That is the origin, not the present. The Anacostia's clubs today are majority Black, they row and race and raft up together, and the color line that made a separate club necessary in 1945 is a matter of history rather than of membership.
The clubhouse sits on the river north of the John Philip Sousa Bridge and just south of the CSX railroad bridge, across the water from the Anacostia Park skating pavilion. In 1965 Seafarers became the first Black boating club admitted to the American Power Boat Association. On May 2, 2022 the clubhouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
The Seafarers Yacht Club, founded 1945 — the oldest African American yacht club in the country, and still a working club. Photo: Ser Amantio di Nicolao, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The fourth of the historic clubs, the District Yacht Club, came together around 1950 under Ed Darnell, took over a former boatyard property about two years later, and was chartered and incorporated in 1955.
What all four have in common is that they have never owned the ground. They own their docks and buildings and hold the land underneath on a lease — from the federal government for most of the last century, and from DC since 2008, when the National Park Service transferred the Boathouse Row land, Eastern's site included, to the city. It is a century-old arrangement between a public landlord and a set of volunteer clubs, and it is why the riverfront they sit on is still public riverfront.
The Gray Bat, and the Swimming Holes
The clubs were not only about keeping a boat somewhere. They raced.
Commodore John E. Battenfield (1866–1950) ran a hydroplane called the Gray Bat that was, for a stretch in the 1920s, recognized as the fastest craft on the Atlantic Coast. He took some thirty trophies before he stopped racing in 1926. He had started out under the Corinthian Yacht Club's colors and later served as Eastern's commodore, and the boat became a fixture of the river.
The best detail about the Gray Bat has nothing to do with trophies. A sportswriter in 1925 described what happened when it came down the Eastern Branch: children at the swimming holes would "beat it for deep water" so they could ride the rollers it threw off as it went past.
Which tells you how many kids were in the water on a summer afternoon. Generations of Washingtonians learned to swim off those banks, in the shadow of the gas works.
That ended in 1971, when swimming was banned outright. Decades of stormwater and sewage, industrial runoff, landfills, and the oil and gas works along the banks had finally made the river unswimmable. The clubs had seen it coming — Washington Yacht Club members were reporting polluters as early as 1923 — and the long cleanup since has been the work of many of the same volunteer organizations. The ban is still in force, and there is now a real campaign to lift it.
What the New Deal Built
The park got its facilities in the 1930s, after Franklin Roosevelt put the Capital Parks system under the National Park Service in 1933 and New Deal money started flowing into it.
The Public Works Administration put up $69,036 in 1936 for a swimming pool in Anacostia Park — roughly $1.3 million in today's money. The BZ Contracting Company built it and finished in early 1937, and it was reported to hold about five hundred swimmers.
The pool also drew the line the river never had. When National Capital Parks moved to desegregate it in June 1949, the Black children who showed up to swim were harassed out of the water and the disorder ran for days before the pool was closed. It is worth knowing, standing at a pool that is open to everyone now, that the free riverbank a hundred yards away had been the easier place to swim for the previous thirty years.
Then, in 1939, Langston Golf Course opened along the eastern shore of the river inside the park — 145 acres, named for John Mercer Langston, the first Black congressman from Virginia.
Langston exists because women asked for it and did not stop asking. Helen Webb Harris founded the Wake-Robin Golf Club in 1937, the first Black women's golf club in the country, and the club immediately began petitioning for public courses open to Black golfers. In 1938 Interior Secretary Harold Ickes approved construction of the nine holes that became Langston. The course went on to host politicians, celebrities, and touring professionals, and Wake-Robin — still the oldest Black women's golf club in the nation — still plays there. Langston was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.
Today it is an eighteen-hole course with a driving range, open to anyone who books a tee time, at the north end of the park.
The Trail That Tied It Together
For most of the twentieth century the park was a string of separate places you drove to. The Anacostia Riverwalk Trail, begun in 2004, is what turned it into one continuous thing.
The trail runs along both banks of the river — better than seventeen miles inside DC alone, part of a network eventually planned at twenty-eight — linking Nationals Park and the Navy Yard to Historic Anacostia, the boat clubs, Anacostia Park, RFK, Kenilworth, and the National Arboretum. Starting in fall 2009, two bridges went in just north of the Sousa Bridge, one on each bank, carrying walkers and cyclists over the CSX tracks that had cut the neighborhoods off from their own waterfront.
That is the practical upshot for anyone living nearby: from Fairlawn or Hill East you can now reach the rink, the pool, the golf course, and the marinas on foot or by bike without crossing a highway.
The Park Itself
Anacostia Park is the public half of this story, and it is a genuinely unusual park.
The roller skating pavilion is the only roller rink in an American national park — about 3,300 square feet of open-air floor under a roof that keeps off sun and rain. Skating is free, and when the rink is open you can borrow skates for nothing.
Alongside it: a public boat ramp and three concession-run marinas next to the four club docks, ballfields, basketball and tennis courts, and picnic pavilions strung out along the water for a mile — all of it on the ground the dredges made.
For a neighborhood, that is a lot of amenity within walking distance, and it is the kind of thing that does not show up in a listing.
Who Rows It Now
The volunteer tradition did not end with the motorboats. The Anacostia Community Boathouse Association is a coalition of member organizations sharing one boathouse on the river: Capital Rowing Club, DC Strokes, American University's crew, Gonzaga, Bishop Ireton, Wakefield, the Anacostia Watershed Society, and the National Capital Area Women's Paddling Association among them. In 2024 those clubs counted close to 1,100 members and well over 2,000 organized practices.
DC Strokes has been rowing on the Anacostia since 1991 and is the oldest LGBTQ+ rowing club in the country — which means the river's habit of hosting the clubs that other clubs would not have is not just history.
Sailing is the one thing the Anacostia does not really do. DC Sail, the community sailing program of the National Maritime Heritage Foundation, runs its lessons, rentals, racing, and youth programs from The Wharf — on the Washington Channel, around the point, not on the Anacostia itself. Same idea, different water.
The People Getting It Clean
The 1971 swimming ban is the one piece of this story that has not yet been undone, and undoing it is the work of a set of organizations that look a lot like the boat clubs did: small, local, and largely volunteer.
The Anacostia Watershed Society started in 1989, when a handful of people decided the river needed someone paying attention to it full time. Its stated job is to clean the water, recover the shores, and honor the heritage — and it is also a member of the Anacostia Community Boathouse Association, which means the same organization restoring the river keeps boats on it.
Anacostia Riverkeeper, founded in 2008, works the trash, the water-quality monitoring, the stormwater advocacy, and public river access. Its Clean Waterways program has run more than 160 volunteer cleanups since 2014 — roughly fifteen a year — and pulled something on the order of 150,000 pounds of debris out of the river and its banks. It is also among the groups pushing to make the Anacostia legally swimmable again.
Ward 8 Woods Conservancy works the land rather than the water, which turns out to be the same fight. Founded in 2018 by Nathan Harrington, it looks after more than 500 acres of forest in Ward 8 — much of it draining straight into the Anacostia — clearing decades of illegal dumping, cutting invasives, and opening trails. It employs a small crew of Park Stewards, Ward 8 residents, to do the work. The scale of the neglect is easy to state: those 500-odd acres of woods have something like 1.4 miles of trail in them, while Rock Creek Park's 1,754 acres have 36.
They are joined by DC's own trash-trap program, the rowing clubs, the watershed groups upstream, and the boat clubs — who have been at this longer than anyone, since Washington Yacht Club members started reporting polluters in 1923.
A century ago this river was where you went because nowhere else would have you. The people working on it now are trying to make it the place you would choose.
Why a Mortgage Company Cares
Because we care about our natural environment, community, and safe recreation on our beautiful urban waterways.
We are a DC company, and our work is helping people put down roots in this city. A mortgage is a thirty-year commitment to a place, and what a place is like to live in has as much to do with its parks, its water, and whether a family can safely get to the riverfront as it does with the house itself. We would rather be lending into a city that is taking care of those things.
The people in this story are the ones taking care of them — the club members who started reporting polluters in 1923, the volunteers who have pulled some 150,000 pounds of debris off the banks, the Ward 8 crews clearing forest that drains straight into the water. That work is why there is a boathouse to row from, a trail to walk, and a free rink to skate on.
Looking at a house on this side of the river? Start with our Fairlawn and Historic Anacostia guides, or get pre-qualified — two minutes, no credit pull.
